Thursday, September 12, 2013

Report: Technology 'Nudges' Guide Students To and Through College

Researchers are tapping into data on students to nudge students through college, according to a report released Tuesday by Education Sector.

Technology-driven behavioral nudges range from providing students
with course recommendations based on the performance of past students to
offering study advice via text messaging or counseling over the phone.
“By giving students information-driven suggestions that lead to smarter
actions, technology nudges are intended to tackle a range of problems
surrounding the process by which students begin college and make their
way to graduation,” said the report.

Some researchers found that sending reminders about placement tests,
orientation and pre-college tasks via text messages to low-income high
school graduates increased the likelihood students would be on campus in
the fall.

The report, “Nudge Nation: A New Way to Prod Students Into and
Through College,” advocated for further research on mining data for
students’ benefits.

“Like many other technology initiatives, these ventures are
relatively young and much remains to be learned about how they can be
made most effective,” the report said.

“Already, however, nudge
designers are having a good deal of success marrying knowledge of human
behavior with the capacity of technology to reach students at larger
scale, and lower cost, than would be possible in person.”

When Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein took his teenage daughter to
the Lollapalooza music festival during a Chicago heat wave some years
ago, the huge electronic displays that typically show performance
schedules also flashed periodic admonitions: DRINK MORE WATER. YOU SWEAT
IN THE HEAT: YOU LOSE WATER. “The sign was a nudge,” wrote Sunstein and
his coauthor Richard Thaler, one of many described in their bestselling
2008 book, Nudge.[1]Without
coercing concertgoers to behave in a certain way, it provided
information designed to prompt them to make wiser decisions—increasing
their water intake to prevent dehydration.

Thanks in part to Thaler and Sunstein’s work, the power of nudges has
become well-established—including on many college campuses, where
students around the country are beginning the fall semester...

New approaches are certainly needed. Just 58 percent of full-time,
first-time college students at four-year institutions complete a degree
within six years. Among Hispanics, blacks, and students at two-year
colleges, the figures are much worse. In all, more than 400,000 students
drop out every year. At a time when post­secondary credentials are more
important than ever, around 37 million Americans report their highest
level of education as “some college, no degree.”[2]

There are many reasons for low rates of persistence and graduation,
including financial problems, the difficulty of juggling non-academic
responsibilities such as work and family, and, for some first-generation
stu­dents, culture shock. But academic engagement and success are major
contributors. That’s why colleges are using behavioral nudges, drawing
on data analytics and behavioral psychology, to focus on problems that
occur along the academic pipeline:

• Poor student organization around the logistics of going to college

• Unwise course selections that increase the risk of failure and extend time to degree

• Inadequate information about academic progress and the need for academic help

• Unfocused support systems that identify struggling students but don’t directly engage with them

• Difficulty tapping into counseling services

These new ventures, whether originating within colleges or created by
outside entrepreneurs, are doing things with data that just couldn’t be
done in the past—creating giant databases of student course records, for
example, to find patterns of success and failure that result when
certain kinds of students take certain kinds of courses. Like many other
technology initiatives, these ventures are relatively young and much
remains to be learned about how they can be made most effective...

Education researcher Benjamin Castleman...[conducted] a 2012 summer experiment with his
collaborator Lindsay Page, a researcher at Harvard’s Center for
Education Policy Research. In randomized experiments involving thousands
of low-income students in the Dallas Independent School District and
districts in Boston, Lawrence, and Springfield, Mass., researchers sent
personalized texts to recent high school graduates in the treatment
groups to remind them about tasks such as registering for freshman
orientation and placement tests. The texts offered help with deciphering
financial aid letters and more. The project was coordinated with the
colleges that most district graduates attend, so the reminders and
accompanying web links took students to the right places to complete
tasks and were tailored to specific deadlines and requirements of each
student’s intended school. Interestingly, although each text offered the
option to connect students to live counselors for personalized
assistance, relatively few students (just six percent in Dallas) sought
this help. Results were strik­ing. Just 10 to 12 text messages sent to
low-income students over the summer raised college enrollment by more
than 4 percentage points among low-income students in Dallas and by more
than 7 percentage points in Lawrence and Springfield, Mass. Castleman
notes that the texting intervention had no impact in Boston, where
students can access a wide range of college-planning support services,
both during the school year and during the summer after graduation. The
total cost of this technology nudge: $7 per student, including the cost
of counselors’ time.

Why was the intervention so effective? “The summer is a uniquely
nudge-free time in students’ educational trajectory,” says Castleman.
Given that so many college-intending adolescents receive few reminders
about completing key tasks—and that so many are prone to
procrastination—well-designed prompts can fill a void...

“Every campus is sitting on terabytes of historical grade data. It’s
just a matter of ... can you take that data, analyze it in the right
kind of way, and communicate it?”

That’s just what [Tristan Denley, provost and vice president for academic affairs at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee] did, creating the Degree Compass
system, which combines data mining and behavior nudges to match
students with “best-fit” courses. It draws on data from hundreds of
thousands of past students, scrutinizing their classes, grades, and
majors. Then it gives current students—and their advisers—course
recommendations based on how well similar undergraduates with similar
course-taking histories have performed in the past. In certain
re­spects, it’s similar to the you-might-also-like choices on Netflix,
Amazon, and Pandora. But Degree Compass is less concerned with students’
likes and dislikes than with predictive analytics—calculating which
course selections will best help undergraduates move through their
programs of study most successfully—and most expeditiously.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

If you have to rely on your darn I phone or tablet to "nudge" you to or through college, you might not need to be engaged in pursuing post secondary education at the university level.

Can't wait until the kid shows up in the registrar or dean's office saying that his nudge ap told him to take a class (based on a one size fits all logrithm and course parameters which are probably not up to date).

For goodness sake young folks grow up and take some responsibility -its YOUR education.

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